BookJou

A hectare of trees is needed just to get one squirrel through the winter

A Scots pine seed looks a bit like the wing of an insect, with a hard seed case and a long papery wing acting like a sail to catch the breeze. The seed endosperm crop is an essential food source for crossbills, siskins, tits, woodpeckers and red squirrels. Red squirrels shred the scales to get at the seeds, eating up to 200 cones a day. A hectare of trees is needed just to get one squirrel through the winter. […] Rodents and insects love pine seeds so a forest must produce a seed crop larger than the appetites of the rest of the food chain if it wants its seedlings to stand a chance. This seems to be the reason behind synchronous mast years - when all the trees produce a spectacular crop of seed at the same time.

Scots pines synchronise their flowering over 200 miles

Not only do Scots pines give their pollen the best possible start in life, they also synchronise their flowering across distances of up to 200 miles. How do they know? Ecologists have suggested hormonal communication on the wind, as well as via fungal networks underground, or it could be a deeply embedded genetic trigger activated by certain climatic thresholds. But no one really knows yet.

Ferns and mosses will grow with global warming

In Siberia rampant moss is already hindering the establishment of larch seedlings. The accumulation of carbon dioxide acidifies the soil, in the same way that CO$_2$ acidifies the ocean, suffocation other plants.

Implied violoence of brutalist forest architecture

The palette of the hill is red with moss, pink from the granite, bright green with shoots of blaeberry, the orange and red and white of lichen, all set against the blanket grey of heavy rainclouds pressing down. Below me the forest is an unending green, punctuated by trucks on the highway and the iron grey of the River Spey looping through the trees. Far off are the bare burned-brown grouse moors and the geometric blocks of plantations that now appear to me to have all the implied violence of brutalist concrete architecture.

Trees can see and hear

Monoterpenes are volatile organic chemicals produced by pines that the trees use to send signals to each other - to deter herbivores or insects or to coordinate seed release. Monoterpenes are tiny molecules that carry pine scent and bounce sunlight back into space. When pines are metabolising in sunlight there can be as many as 1000-2000 particles per cubic centimetre in the air around the tree, reducing the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth. Via the density of the chemical signal and the availability of light, they can detect the presence of other trees. In fact, they see the space in polygons, growing away from their neighbours and towards the light, creating a five-sided tesselation in the canopy that is the basis of self-organisation in the forest${}^{10}$. Through the structure of their cells, trees can capture reverberations and ‘hear’ sounds around them as well as ultrasound far away${}^{11}$. Pines can detect the familiar presence of rustling needles or the crack of a falling tree, and of course they communicate and look after each other through the rich mycorrhizal network underground. Scots pines have one of the most developed fungal networks in the soil, with over nineteen known ecto-mycorrhizal relationships for sharing carbon, nitrogen, eseential acids and other nutrients.

The shift from rights of usage to rights of ownership

The shift from rights of usage to rights of ownership, seen as the mercantile spirit of northern Europe inveigled or imposed itself across the world, was, it seems, the crucial shift, as forests ceased to be seen as sacred places of wonder, mystery and sustenance and instead became a standing crop with a value expressed in pounds, shillings and pence calculated by the acre and the ton.

The real tragedy is the enclosure of common land

The so-called tragedy of the commons (that humans cannot be trusted to manage a common resource sensibly) might be a problem for individualistic societies unable to restrain pollution and over-exploitation, but as a histrocial explanatio for the British landscape it doesn’t hold except perhaps as a retrospective ideological justification for the real tragedy to follow: the enclosure of common land.

In any carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

Twisted pines grow in the most unlikely of cracks in the rocks. Dead trees, standing and fallen, are everywhere. This is the signature characteristic of wildwood - dead trees are allowed to rest where they fall. Dead trees support far more life than living ones, hence the density of bird life. Some species like tree pipits and redstarts associate only with old-grown forests because of the volume and species of insects. The great spooted woodpecker nests only in dead Scots pines. Even more niche, the pine hoverfly breeds exclusively in wet hollows of dead Scots pines. No wonder it is almost extinct in Scotland.

Scotlands signature landscape - the bog - is a ruined landscape

Rackham argues that pine wood never stretched from shore to shore., but it certainly covered most of Scotland until Mesolithic humans began to clear the forest for agriculture, hunting and construction. Managing the forest rhrough felling, clearing or burning for game played a role in creating biodiverse habitats of heath and moor, but also set the stage for the creeping blanket bog that has become upland Britain’s signature landscape. The bog is, in a sense, a ruined ecosystem as tree clearance has allowed minerals and iron to be washed into the lower layers of the soil, creating a pan impermeable to water. Unable to drain, the rundra-type landscape becomes waterlogged, and plants do not fully decompose, forming peat.

Migration of Scots pine to Scotland supported by humans

Before driving north, I read a scientific paper by Lithuanian researchers demonstrating that the DNA of Scots pine in the eastern half of Scotland came from a refugium - a place where species survived the last ice age - near Moscow around 9000-8000 BCE. Previous DNA analysis has shown that the surviving pines in the west of Scotland came from the Iberian peninsula in modern-day Portugal and Spain. In both cases the seed migrated to Scotland on timescales hundreds of times faster than is possible through natural succession. The most likely vehicle for such rapid migration was humans.

The first expression of an economic system founded on overreach

The Romanes, Danes and the nobles of England were in search of natural resources, principally timber. The colonisation of Wales was the first expression of an economic system founded on overreach: having exceeded the limits of what their own environment could sustain, early mercantilists applied force to acquire tribute and resources elsewhere. Empire, whether British, Viking, Roman or otherwise, is by definition overreach. And colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy share a common, perverse philospoph: limits on some human’s freedom of action are seen as an affront to the principle of freedom itself. The excat opposite of the co-evolutionary dynamic of the forest.

The elite six boreal tree species

It was only when I discovered that a tiny handful of tree species make up the treeline that I began to see that an attempt at description might be possible. An elite club, the six featured here are the familiar markers of the northern territories: three conifers and three broadleaves evolved to survive the cold. Moreover, remarkably, each of these tree species has made a sectio of the treeline its own, outcompeting other species and anchoring unique ecosystems: Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandiavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska, and, to a lesser extent, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland.

But now the planet is hyperventilating

But now the planet is hyperventilating. This bright green halo is moving unnaturally fast, crowning the planet with a laurel of needles and leaves, turning the white Arctic green. The migration of the treeline north is no longer a matter of centimetres per century; instead it is hundreds of metres every year. The trees are on the move. They shouldn’t be. And this sinister fact has enormous consequences for all life on earth.

The treeline is a moving target

The fact that in modern usage the term ‘treeline’ has come to mean a fixed line on a map indicating the growing limit of trees is simply evidence of the very narrow time horizon of humans, and of how much we have come to take our current habitat for granted.

The prevalence of insignificance makes postdocs perish like fruit flies

Significance arises only where a relationship is not due to chance. In these cases, the null hypothesis is refuted and an alternative hypothesis vindicated. Impotantly, the null hypothesis does not need to be proved; it is only refuted trough expriments demonstrating significant results. […] The fact that the overwhelming majority of results are insignificant proves the wisdom of the presumption of chance. The prevalence of insignificance also explains why postdocs end up perishing like fruit flies rather than publishing.

Scientists are supposed to presume the null hypothesis

The trouble is that biologists consider function rather than neutrality as the default state. They presume significance - selection - rather than chance, which in this case is mostly drift. This stance is unscientific. Scientists are supposed to presume the null hypothesis, which roughly postulates that every relationship is the result of chance unless proved otherwise. The burden of proving significance weighs on the scientist except in evolutionary biology, where significance is the starting point. In this field, the burden of proof lies with whoever argues that chances determines the emergence, morphology, and size of a particular trait.

Generality is the signal and uniqueness the noise

Fundamentally, neutraity helps us keep our attention on the case that matters most, which is the general case. Aristotle described the proper focus of science when he aserted that “the universal is more important than the perception of particular cases.” Yet biologists obsess over uniqueness, hence Romanes’s unheeded admonition that specific characters - traits that distinguish a species from its nearest relatives - are precious to taxonomists but may well be useless for the organisms themselves. The traits on which species boundaries are based need not be useful; the need only be nonlethal. Indeed, as I detail in Chapter 7, the most useful traits tend to be those shared by many species, those that have proven their value to survival and reproduction across geological time and thus have persisted through bottlenecks. Generality is the signal - the selected - and uniqueness the noise. For evidence, we might look to our own eyes and genomes and fingerprints. Every human iris has its special patterns of colors, every genome its unique contents, and every fingerprint its singular topography of ridges and valleys. These signatures are useful to criminal investigators and designers of biometric passwords; they are biological indicators of the individual and no one else. All useful traits resemble each other; each neutral trait is special in its own way.

Nineteen tails in a row may still be due to chance?

The textbook example of the null hypothesis is the flip of a coin. Each coin flipped has a fifty-fifty chance of landing on heads or tails. According to the lat of large numbers, one has to repeat the flip many times in order to achieve the expected 1:1 ratio of heads to tails. How many times? The consensual number, twenty, was theorized by the statistician an geneticist Ronald Fisher. According to Fisher’s significance level, nineteen tails in a row may still be due to chance, but twent signifies a loaded coin. In experimental science, results obtained twenty times are said to be signfiicant, refuting the null hypothesis.

Aversion to neutrality is also embedded in language

Aversion to neutrality is also embedded in language. In Enlish, neutrality is expressed through the cancellation of other states. One may be nonaligned, disinterested, detached, unbiased, asexual, indifferent, or impartial. In this way, neutrality is coded as exceptional rather than normal. The normal state is one of preference or tendency, and neutrality is its negation. Linguists would describe neutrality as marked, which is to say uncommon, while the absence of neutrality is unmarked.

A universal theory is dubiously derived from an extreme case

If archipelagos are not nature simplified but rather nature in exceptional form, then the Galápagos is the exception to beat all others. Although situated in an equatorial region, the Galápagos archipelago has an exceptionally harsh climate. It is a kind of tropical desert - nothing like lush mainland Ecuador. Darwin notes in his Journal of Researches, “This archipelago, instead of possessing ahumid climate and rank vegetation, cannot be considered oherwise than exremely arid.” In average years, only the highest altitudes of the larger islands receive enough rainfall to support tropical life. The littoral and inland areas of the islands are classified as “arid” and “very arid” and are covered by brown and gray vegetation. Rainfall also varies considerably with altitude, between islands, and over time. Such conditions foster competition, the backbone of natural selection. One millimeter of beak length might be a question of life and death on the Galápagos’s lava, but two meters of neck length are negligible in the African savanna. A universal theory is dubiously derived from such an extreme case.

The Galápagos archipelago is unique

The finch, it turns out, is a good model for the study of natural selection, but this does not mean that the evolution of its beak followed a typical, much less unbiquitous pathway.

No lone road to the promised land

Alongside the numerous Galápagos species that did not stimulate Darwin’s genius, even the finches demonstrate D’Arcy Thompson’s dictum, announced in this book’s epigraph, that there are many paths to survival. Some were traced by darwin and his acolytes, some by Romanes, some by other theorists. Perhaps some have not yet been imagined or discovered. Nature may follow one or another of these paths more frequently, but none is the lone road to the promised land.

Alternative pathway of evolutionary biology

So Mendel got lucky, too. Had he continued with mice, he would not have been able to understand the genetic basis of the experimental outcome. But genetics would have been the same because Mendel’s laws, being universal, would have been discovered by others. In fact, they were - thirty-five years after he first presented his findings. The same is probably not true of evolutionary biology. If Darwin had not stumbled onto the finches, evolutionary biology would likely have taken another course: one less selectionist and less prone to the fallacies of the domestication analogy and to capitalism.

Nature's wide ranges are counterproductive

Nowhere is this antinomy more flagrant than in physiological ranges. On the farm, ranges keep narrowing; in the wild, as I discuss in Chapter 6, they keep widening. Wide ranges are counterproductive because they drive specimens away from the optimal point. That is why optimizers of all stripes declare war on quantitative variability. Consider what has become of the domesticated cow. The size of its ancestors must have been as variable as the behavior of wild foxes and the look and flavor of uncultivated apples. But geneticists, zoologists, bankers, marketeers, engineers, and consumers took it upon themselves to fabricate, sell, and buy the most cost-efficient cow. Their success is evident in a remarkable degree of standardization. Less than a hundred pounds separate the heaviest and lightest breeds, from Herefords at 1,419 pounds to Gelbvieh at 1,323 pounds. Nature’s cattle don’t have to meet the efficiency targets of business; only artificial selection grudges pennies like that.

...an organism's sole purpose was to cover its expenses

Optimization is the heart of breeding. Before breeders bent nature to human whim, an organism’s sole purpose was to cover its expenses. In the context of breeding, the organism’s purpose is to provide humans as much as it can, at least the expense. Even the earliest breeders of the Fertile Crescent couldn’t settle for whatever supplied their own subsistence, since the had to feed growing numbers of nonproductive people such as chiefs, soldiers, and priests. Margins were bordn. Nowadays, with a vastly larger human population, optimization is imperative. Thanks to the domestication analogy, humanity is convinced that this sort of optimization is necessary in nature too.

Humanity stops at nothing

Wheras nature knows enough, humanity stops at nothing. The cult of excellence venerates just one winner - or, in some cases, one especially important loser. In nature, there are many good enoughs. The survivors and reproducers are multiple and varied.

Chance governs life, waste is everywhere, novelty is the exception

Optimization is the sort of thing neoclassical economists dream about. It combats chance, waste, and stagnation, but these are the consitutive properties of nature: chance governs life; waste is everywhere; novelty is the exception and stasis the rule. And because there are never two identical individuals, at least one in any pair is not optimized. Whereas the art of breeding consists in creating the next improved model, more functional and standardized than the last, nature prefers none of that. Domestication, the foundation on which Darwin’s understanding of nature is built, has one enemy: nature itself.

Natural selection and eugenics

By inferring natural from artificial selection and thereby favoring selection over elimination and toleration, Darwin not only fostered an enduring intellectual error but also set the table for the horrors of eugenics. His defenders have separated him from this legacy of death and oppression by distinguishing his evolutionary ideas from those of Spencer and Galton and by pointing to his own avowed preferences. Rather than espousing improving the human stock by terminating the unfit, Darwin argued for uplifting the disadvantaged through welfare policies, which he saw as expression of “the instinct of sympathy, which was originally caquired as port of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered…more tender and more widely diffused.” But we should not absolve him so easily. The discoverer of natural selection was certainly humane, but he also warned against the suicidal aspect of his disposition: “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man… Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Again – for the point cannot be made often enough – natural selection describes the way that humans act, not the ways of nature; it ascribes human modes of action to nature. Thus did nature become an authoritative supporter of social competition and hierarchy.

No one has ever equated evolution with stagnation

Change is the exception in nature and conservatism the rule. “Stasis is data, stasis is data, stasis is data,” was Gould’s mantra. “Say it ten times before breakfast every day for a week, and the argument will surely seep in by osmosis.” He meant that evolution cannot reasonably be a theory of change alone, for stasis is everywhere, and this observation counts, too. Dawkins agrees: “Although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a ‘good thing,’ especially since we are all the product of it, nothing actually ‘wants’ to evolve. Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicatios (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.” In nature, stagnation is good and change is bad unless proved otherwise. We shouldn’t glean too much from Gould’s and Dawkins’s enunciation of this principle, though. They are arguably the two best-known evolutionary writers of their generation, but in practice, the discipline and its public communication are viscerally change-oriented, always emphasizing variation and not adaptation. Not for nothing is the word evolution often used synonymously with progress and development. No one has ever equated evolution with stagnation.

Color blindness was certainly not elected

But while color blindness was certainly not elected, it is not so bad that the afflicted have to be eliminated. Had Darwin gone with natural elimination and exploret its implications, the persistence of these mutations would cause no theoretical difficulty. He would have inoculated the theory of evolution against most of its lingering contradictions, the misunderstandings it provokes, and the resistance it encounters. Where natural selection follows clear rules of breeding at odds with the products of evolution around us, natural elimination allows the idiosyncrasies observed in nature. At the risk of importing the subject even here, one might say – metaphorically – that natural elimination sometimes closes one eye and naps, allowing lousy variations to endure. And sometimes it closes both eyes and takes its shot, killing off the good and the bad alike. Natural elimination has no direction, goal or bias; it is as volatile as it is indifferent.

The principle of breeding

Darwin had celebrated the capacity of ruthless selection to obtain comparativelty minor results: “Lord Rivers, when asked how he succeeded in always having first-rate greyhounds, answered, ‘I breed many, and hang many.’”

A conceptual metaphor does for arguments what scaffolding does for buildings.

There is, in theory, nothing wrong with using an analogy in the course of arguing for natural selection. A conceptual metaphor does for an argument what scaffolding does for buildings. […]

The creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds

Darwin’s defensiveness may also have been a product of blind love. As the founder of a scientific paradigm, he was especially devoted to its vindication. Ludwig Fleck, an inspiration behind Thomas Kuhn’s development of the concept of paradigm shift, noted that creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds. Others are entitled to partake of several approaches, but the revolutionary is left to secure his or her own. For Darwin, this meant a degree of obstinacy in the face of criticism. There was no other way to make such a huge difference in the history of truth.

Never discard a genius's idea...

Never discard a genius’s idea. I uphold that although the domestication analogy is wrong, it can render great service to knowledge if, and only if, it is turned on its head. Instead of inferring natural selection from artificial selection, we should infer from emestication what nature is not. In what follows, I explore what breeders do in order to isolate how their values and activities produce results different from what occurs in nature. We will see here the true source of the eugenic and capitalistic ethics ascribed to evolution: not natural law but human hybris.

'Natural elimination' instead of 'natural selection'

Had Darwin not been under the spell of fanciers, he may have called his discovery “natural elimination” and reserved “selection” for the rare cases of fixation and stabilization of advantageous varieties. What is eliminated? The lethal and the luckless. In this alternate universe, the history of biology, and its contemporary predilections,would be vastly different. Instead of fitness, we would speak of chance. The recipe for escaping natural elimination? Take normalcy and add luck. Luck is the necessary ingredient for the good enough; often it is the sufficient one, too.

The organic law of the balancing between the volumes of organs

“…One cannot meet a body more cramped from front to back.” But he also thought to explain, in universal terms, the giraffe’s thriving in spite of such disproportionality. He credited the “organic law” of “the balancing between the volumes of organs,” whereby “asystem of organs acquires a dimension out of proportion only when other organs are restricted and reduced by an equivalent amount.” This notion of physiological trade-offs was axiomatic among scientific minds of the era and is maintained even in today’s evolutionary language. As Goethe wrote and Darwin quoted in the Origin, “The budget of Nature is fixed, but she is free to dispose of particular sums by any appropriation that may please her. In order to spend on one side, she is forced to economize on the other side.” Saint-Hillaire thought the giraffe’s disproportions a “memorable” example of this law at work.

The domestication analogy run amok

One cannot blame the giraffe for leading evolutionists astray. It did not choose its strangeness and celebrity, the qualities that made it such an inviting target for theorists’ assumptions of adaptation. Chapter 2 takes up this assumption directly. Why were Darwin and his interlocutors so certain that traits were adaptive in the first place? In some cases, such as that of the finches discussed in Chapter 3, there was good evidence. But in many other cases, all that theorists had to go on was a mistaken analogy between nature and domestication. They thought the jungle was like a farm, where a breeder called natural selection wrought ever-finer creatures from one generation to the next. This analogy ran amok, we will see, is foundational to the selectionst dogma that continues to afflict thinking about evolution and its ethical consequences.

Such a consequential weapon could never be the claim of one country alone...

Firs, Mivart argued that if having a long neck was so advantageous, “we ought to have seen at least several forms, similar to the giraffe, developed from different Ungulata… Being needful, there should be many animals with it.” In other words, if the long neck is adaptively beneficial, why is it not seen among related animals? Darwin retorted that there are events, in the hiotory of humanity, that occurred in one country but not in others. This seems an ungraceful pirouette. The long neck, as Darwin saw it, was not any odd event in the giraffe’s evolution but its survival edge. Such a consequential weapon could never be the exclusive claim of one country, as the nuclear arms race reminds us.

Answers tend to die young, but a good question lives forever.

The giraffe’s carreer as a scientific challenge seemed to be over. Posterity’s verdict was unanimous - Darwin was right, Lamarck was ridiculous, affair closed. After Darwinism solved the mystery of the neck, biologists lost interest in the giraffe for nearly a century. But the case was reopened when field researchers studied giraffes in Africa.The accumulating facts reveal many holes in the canonical understanding.

Evolutionary biologists invert the scientific principle

In science, methodological neutrality is expreses by the null hyptothesis, namely that every relationship between phenomena is, by default, the fruit of chance. The burden of refutation weighs on the researcher. You don’t have to prove innocence of justify chance.

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten...

Karel Čapek:

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten, dann fänden wir es vielleicht genauso schwer, mit ihnen auszukommen, wie mit anderen Leuten.

The essence of mathematics, physics, and biology

Again, I question the roles of novelty and merit in the selection process. But though I come to this subject from my same philosophical perspective, I might add that there aee serious and even trailblazing biologists on my side. True, none of them has offered a comprehensive complementary theory to explain what Darwin and his followers leave out. Even so, I take heart from the words of Sydney Brenner, who won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in discovering messenger RNA (mRNA). “Wheras,” Brenner explains, “mathematics is the art of the perfect and physics the art of the optimal, biology, because of evolution, is only the art of the satisfactory.” Species need not be perfect or optimal, only satifactory. Fancois Jacob opposes in his autobiography Jacques Monod’s Cartesian idea of nature to his: “I saw nature as a rather good girl. Generous, but a little dirty. A little messy. Working in a piecemeal way. Doing what she could with what she found.”

The absurdity of intelligent design

Partisans of intelligent design argue in bad faith, so they might still claim my views on behalf of their mistaken ideas. In fact, my arguments vitiate theirs; there is a strong corellation between the uqiquity of neutrality and the falseness of intelligent design. That is because intelligent design is parasitic on selectionism. Intelligent design begins from the premise, supplied by selectionism, that species are optimized. ntelligent design takes Darwin’s analogy to domestication as more than figurative, asking how the perfection of nature - or, in Wallace’s case, the human specifically - could possibly be achieved without the intervention and direction of an intelligent force, a great cosmic breeder or sculptor. In contrast to both selectionism and intelligent design, the theory of the good enough turns our attention to nature’s many imperfections. Because nature is not optimzed, intelligent design advocates are actually assigning waste and mediocrity to the handiwork of an omnipotent being of supernatural intelligence. Why venerate such a lazy and inept God? When we temper our selectionist expectations, the absurdity of intelligent design emerges in even sharper belief.

Why should we struggle and strain when we are all good enough?

In chapter 10, I conclude with an exploration of what humanity’s safety net means for ethics, resolving that competition within society is a fool’s game. We need far less excellence than we cultivate. We do it anyway because the best of our neurons, those that rescued us from extinction, are underemployed and overqualified - not because doing so is necessary or even, in many cases, useful. More often, it is crushing. Being excellence-driven myself, I am well placed to know to futility and the masochism of this pursuit. Though our capitalist institutions tell us that we mst constantly strive, that nature ordains competition to be the best and reap the rewards, nature in fact offers no rewards beyond survival and reproduction. Both are assured by a safety net that allows us to be just fine even though we are so much less than optimal. Why should be struggle and strain when we are all good enough?

Much that distinguishes organisms from one another is not adaptive

And I explain more thoroughly the idea of the two evolutions. The first, concering qualitative variation, is in the province of Darwinism and adaptation. The second, concerning quantitative variation, is in the province of the good enough and neutrality. Again, natural selection is real; adaptation is real. But much that distinguishes organisms from one another, particularly differences in size, is not adaptive. These variations are not selected; they are tolerated.

Posterity heuristics

Posterity tends to make its choices with the help of two heuristics. One in incumbency bias: the earlier one enters the pantheon, the harder he or she is to expell, no matter the quality of the work celebrated. The other is laziness bias: posterity tends to select those who were already recognized by their own contemporaries; a lifetime of success is an important, if not strictly necessary, condition for posthumois lionization. Rare exceptions such as Gregory Mendel will console only inveterate optimists.

Natural selection is spectacular, chance is not

And yet spectacular as natural selection is in these cases, most birds are primarily generalists, most crickets are simple-minded, most antilopes are guileless, and springboks also pronk in the absence of predators. Species and organisms often survice not because they are are special but because they don’t have to be. On this view, however, they possess no magnetism, no elegance. They tell no story and project no significance into the world. To say that most of what survives was not selected but is just not bad enough to be eliminated is to demote natural selection from its exalted place in the order of life. Natural selection is biology’s greatest intellectual contribution; of course it is prized. Natural law leaves us quaking in wonder, while chance interests only gamblers.

Natural selection is not a natural law; it is a relative frequency.

Lynn Margulis, the pioneer of the theory of symbiosis in evolution, defined herself as an adherent of descent with modification and an adversary of selection as its principal agent. She rejected the “capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit” interpretation of Darwin.

The absurdity of intelligent design

Partisans of intelligent design argue in bad faith, so they might still claim my views on behalf of their mistaken ideas. In fact, my arguments vitiate theirs; there is a strong corellation between the uqiquity of neutrality and the falseness of intelligent design. That is because intelligent design is parasitic on selectionism. Intelligent design begins from the premise, supplied by selectionism, that species are optimized. ntelligent design takes Darwin’s analogy to domestication as more than figurative, asking how the perfection of nature - or, in Wallace’s case, the human specifically - could possibly be achieved without the intervention and direction of an intelligent force, a great cosmic breeder or sculptor. In contrast to both selectionism and intelligent design, the theory of the good enough turns our attention to nature’s many imperfections. Because nature is not optimzed, intelligent design advocates are actually assigning waste and mediocrity to the handiwork of an omnipotent being of supernatural intelligence. Why venerate such a lazy and inept God? When we temper our selectionist expectations, the absurdity of intelligent design emerges in even sharper belief.

Natural selection as nature's safety net

Chapter 7 draws on the theory of facilitated variation, developed by Marc Kirschner and John Gehrhart, to explain the mechanisms underlying this tolerance. This theory holds that for three billion years, a process of natural selection furnished the biological foundations of all extant creatures. Secured by this sturdy infrastructure, which I call nature’s safety net, organisms havespent the last four hundred million years getting away with much waste and inefficiency. They can afford their waste thanks to highly optimized selected traits, but the waste itself is not selected.

Our excess bubbles and blooms

I argue that the future powers a division of labor so thorough that it obliterates all challenges to humanity’s survival, leaving us with a world of free lunches, ease, and boredom. We face no species-level threats except perhaps those ecological ones that are products of unavaoidable excess. This excesss is unavoidable because we have little to do from a survival standpoint. Humans have the ultimate luxury of wasting time and resources in order to divert ourselves. The skills our ancestors cultivated for the purpose of survival no longer serve that purposem yet the skills remain. We have the means to achieve ends we no longer need to worry about, so the means become ends themselves. Our excess bubbles and blooms not because it is selected through a process if struggle but because there is no struggle.

Evolutionary biologists invert the scientific principle

In science, methodological neutrality is expresed by the null hyptothesis, namely that every relationship between phenomena is, by default, the fruit of chance. The burden of refutation weighs on the researcher. You don’t have to prove innocence of justify chance.

Der intuitive Geist ist ein Geschenk...

Einstein:

Der intuitive Geist ist ein Geschenk und der rationale Geist ein treuer Diener. Wir haben eine Gesellschaft erschaffen, die den Diener ehrt und das Geschenk vergessen hat.

Darwinian bias toward natural selection is baked into popular understanding

Because the Darwinian bias toward natural selection is now baked into popular understanding of evolution, it is not enough to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, but also to tell the whole truth. Rather than presume and seek out a selectionist explanation for what most likely are neutral traits, biologists might presume the ubiquity of the latter even as they marvel at the exceptions. And they might talk about it in public. Doing so would make an immense difference. Differential algebra, organic chemistry, and optical physics have no impact on our worldview; the theory of evolution does. When specialists in these other fields realize that they have been operating on the basis of unsound presuppositions, the corrections tend to stay “in house.” Their fields are torn down and rebuilt, but the rest of us are unperturbed. By contrast, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian ideas such as survival of the fittest, optimization, adaptation, and Malthusian competition reverberate in the way we experience reality, society, and ourselves. It follows that when these ideas misrepresent nature, they weigh heavily on our self-representation.

Darwin would not be published in Nature today

“Scientists apply themselves to what they believe to be the most important of the problems that seem tractable,” the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francois Jacob wrote; “those that rightly or wrongly they think they will be able to solve.” Peter Medawar, another biology Nobelist, calls science “the art of the soluble.”

Thank you. This I'm used to.

And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else.

The secret codes of life

The secret codes of life - whether presented as a gift or a burden - go totally unapreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.

Scales

And God suddenly bolts up in His bed with a revelation: everything that creates iself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

Meaning varies with spatial scale

Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed of of your your Shakespearian plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.

Slide down the intelligence ladder

And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

Fantasies

God: > Your fantasies have cursed your realities.

Egalitaire

The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentivelesssystem with a bunch of pinkos. The convervatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.

The Wozniaks and the Segways

After about five and a half hours of watching magic shows with the Wozniaksm we headed out of the club toward the valet. We handed our stub to the attendantm but the Wozniaks just kept walking toward the dark parking lot.

How could this happen?

People were asking, “How could this happen?” And unfortunately, the answer is obvious. First, it’s real easy to get your hands on a high-powered assault rifle in America. Combine that with a president who de-stigmatized outward hatred in social-media platforms that allow people to stoke flames of hatred to the point of combustion.

Are you Jew...ish?

It’s not like other religions in that way. Even if you don’t believe in Judaism, you, my friend, are still a Jew. You can’t really opt out of it.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait...

Scaling up, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE feared they might be next, they were happy to see the US-led multinational coalition deal with the problem. Doubly so, as many of these countries either lacked the forces to make substantial contribution or - as in Saudi Arabia’s case - the desire to do any fighting. So instead the stumped up direct payments of $84 billion to the US, Britain and France, who did the lion’s share of the fighting, and extra support to cover bases and logistics. No one would suggest that the combatant countries actually made a profit on the war, or that they were motivated by the payments. Nonetheless, the way that rich but militarily weak of self-indulgent nations could simply outsource the violence - and the dying - to foreigners is a pattern that Macchiavelli would have recognised from the days when mercenary captains fought Italian city-states’ wars for them.

The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month...

The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month, but to the state providing the force, not the individual grund on the ground. That would not cover the basic pay and provisions of a British Army private but compares very favourably with an Ethiopian average salary of $275 per month, and the government can pocket the difference between what the UN provides and what it pays its men.

Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security...

Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security - and for the same reason, all kinds of other institutions and individuals can be deployed to ‘do security’.

Once, generals could accept the deaths...

Once, generals could accept the deaths of thousands in a single day’s carnage with, if not equuanimity, a conviction that this was what war mean. (While, as Lord Wellington is meant to have said when one of his artillery men had sight of Napoleon at Waterloo, ‘it is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another’.) Now, things are different.

Offensives can as easily be launched...

Offensives can as easily be launched from a newsromm or a boardroom as a cabinet warroom. Your ‘soldiers’ may not carry your passport; they may not even know they are in a war, or on whose side they are fighting.

In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps...

In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps, of 75 million dead and of the atomic mushroom clud, the United Nations was conceived, in the words of Dag Hammarsköld, its second secretary general, ‘not to lead mankind into heaven but to save humanity from hell’.

Besides, for the US in particular...

Besides, for the US in particular, when the 9/11 attacks generated a sudden and irresistable demand for intelligende support for the ‘War on Terror’, this was the only way an intelligence community that had suffered a decade of contraction could respond rapidly. You cannot train officers to speak Farsi or pivot them from Kyiv to Kabul overnight, but you can hope to hire that existing expertise. Short-term response become long-term dependency, though: as a 2007 presentation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put it, ‘We can’t spy … if we wan’t buy!’

Suddenly, everything can be weaponised...

Suddenly, everything can be weaponised as part of the expanding array (arsenal, even) of military metaphors all around us. The irony is that just as the language of real war is becoming blandly euphemistic (with ‘delivery systems’ causing ‘collateral damage’), civilian speech becomes more martial. Beyong the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘Battle Against COVID’ (British prime minister Boris Johnson even hailed news of vaccines as proof that the ‘scientific cavalry’ were ‘coming over the brow of the hill’), everything now seems couched in military terminology. In part this may reflect the new age in which a terrorist’s bomb or a rival’s sanctions could hit anyone, any time, leaving us feeling like reluctant conscripts on an invisible battlefield.

Close allies compete viciously...

Close allies compete viciously for trade deals and a technological edge, for precedence and prestige. If now we have no real enemies, the sad corollary is that we have no real friends, either.

A Swiss Army knife is a very fine instrument ideed...

A Swiss Army knife is a very fine instrument indeed, but if you insist on adding more and more tools to it, and take out the knife to make room for, say a bonsai rake and a magnifying glass, arguably you miss the point. Often it is better to use a different gadget, one specifically dedigned for the job, and not ruin your Swiss Army knife at the same time.

Even the UN hire private security companies...

Even the UN hire private security companies to protect its missions. In1994, when the genocide was being practised with murderous abandon in Rwanda and no governments seemed inclined to step in, the UN’s then-Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, considered hiring one of the biggest, DSL, to intervene. He ultimately ung back, saying that ‘the world may not be ready to privatise peace’, but it certainly seems to be willing again to privatise war.

The two-income family

Harper´s magazine in December struck a sombre economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity´s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and houswork, but rather what this would do to the man´s traditional standing as breadwinner. ´I´d be ashadmed to let my wife work,´ one man told Mavity tardly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not. Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws makin it illegal to employ a married woman.

Omar has proved a lot of myths to be wrong or misleading.

Omar has proved a lot of myths to be wrong or misleading. ‘Teams hoping to get promoted from the Championship should employ players with experience of playing in that league’ is not true if you look at the numbers. ‘Managers should get their teams to play more aggressively’ is an unqualifiable and meaningless statement. ‘The wage bill in the Premier League team determines results’ is only true for the gap between the ‘big six’ and the rest of the league. Teams outside the big six can do well on smaller budgets. ‘The success of Spain and Barcelona means that clubs should look for shorter players’ is no established by research. Instead, there is a risk that teams get caught up in a rush to follow fads. Myth after myth fails when Omar starts to do his statistical checks.

Sir Alex' last few seasons at Manchester United

Reading the analyses Sam performed during his time working at Opta, it is clear that he made good use of their extensive data sets. An article he wrote in 2013 about Manchester Unites’s shot conversion was particularly revealing. During Alex Fergusons last few seasons at the club, United had fewer shots than their title rivals, but they scored from more of the chances they created. Using ‘expected goals’ Sam showed that United scored more because they were shooting centrally, in positions that were more likely to result in a goal. Howver, he also suggested that even accounting for their better shooting position, their success was unsustainable.

Is it really the referees only?

I very much doubt that FIFA will redraw the penalty area. Instead, referees already attempt to compensate for its poor current design. 61% of the penalties are awarded in the 18 yard by 20 yard area found by extending forward from the six-yard box to the edge of the penalty box. The other 39% are awarded in the two 18 yard by 12 yard areas on either side. That makes the probability per square yard of bein awarded a penalty in a central area 2.1 times greater than the probability of being awarded one on the outer edges. Penalties on the edges of the box are exceptions rather than the rule.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to...

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Damm and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and temote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn´t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilles fields.

Fashion was moving on...

Fashion was moving on. American holiday makers were discovering the seaside. The White Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people - parvenus from Boston and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on the assumption that visitors would come for a fortnight at least, but the motor care gave tourists a fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivalled splendour of the White Mountains - the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of the little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem - and encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.

The State Senate of Illinois...

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP) - The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ´for reasons of efficiency and economy´.

About Bill Shankley's immortal words

It was the former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley who wpoke the immportal words, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death… I’s more important than that.’ These words are often interpreted as conveying how strongly fans feel about their team, or to explain the obsessions of players and managers. But they can be read in other ways. When Shankley spoke them in a TV interview in 1981, he was partly expressing regret that he was unable to properly enjoy life beyond football. He was describing an addiction to football that had clouded other parts of his life.

The secrets of the analysts

Premier league analysts were even more cautious than René when they spoke to me. As I talked to them about mathematical methods for analysing player tracking data on order to improve tactics they were very keen to hear my ideas, but they were not so keen to talk on the record about what they were currently doing. Howver, my overall impression remained the same as I described at the end of Chapter 9. The main reason that clubs don’t let talk their analysts in detail about player-tracking data isn’t because they are worried about their secrets will be revealed. Instead, they are worried that the opposition will find out that they don’t have any secrets to reveal. While maths is increasingly used in scouting, its potential uses in tactical development remain largely unexploited.

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east...

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as muc as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for historic creatures and passages to the west or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and monet to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the old world and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imanine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy mountains of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendrilled, purply-lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteennth century - and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy kenness and trembling fingers.

If there is one thing the AT teaches...

If there is one thin the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a mois sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between the roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed to a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs the phloem, xylem and cambium perform.

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns...

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills you go through a series of staged transformations - a kind of gentle descent in squalor - and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day disgustingly so; by the third you are beyond caring; by the fourth you have firgotten what it is like not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night you are starving for your noodles; on the second night you are starving but wish it wasn’t noodles; on the third you don’t want the noodles but you know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can’t explain it, but it’s strangely agreeable.

And since then?

Oh, since then I’ve travelled and seen the world. There’s damned little equality going about. Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on peaople with a strong hand - ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers - they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died when I arrived in London last week, when I observed people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile - but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I still believe in the brotherhood of man, but it’s not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It’s no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process.

I think one of the things that really separates us from the higher primates...

I think one of the things that really separates us from the higher primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The cCondor used the least amount of energy to move a kilometre. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. That didn’t look so good. But then, somebody at Scientific american had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle completely blew the condor away, completely off the top of the chart.

The more choices we give ourselves...

The more choices we give ourselves, the harder it becomes to choose, like taking a seat in an almost empty thatre. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tested the ‘less is more’ theory by reducing the number of cats on show in their adoption centre in Colorado. With 40 per cent fewer cats for visitor to choose from, the adoption rate doubled.

Remember that vulnerability is a good feeling...

Remember that vulnerability is a good feeling, it’s the feeling we get when we are about to grow or connect with something or someone important. And the best thing we can do when we know there’s something important we are putting off is to ‘eat that frog’.

Let there be spaces...

Let there be spaces in out togetherness.

When you start to focus...

When you start to focus on the parts of your life and the people who inspire and energize you, you remind yourself of all the good things you already have, rather than constantly being on the search for more. More ‘stuff’ is just a temporary fix; genuine abundance starts with gratitude. If you can take a few minutes each day to remind yourself of all the things in your life you are grateful for, all the opportunities and exciting choices you have, tou automatically begin to focus your life on the things and people that make you happy and bring success. Stop comparing yourself to others and worrying about the things you don’t have - focus on what’s good and how you can prioritize these things and people in your life.

We must be willing to fail...

We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

There is a wonderful book called 'Simplicity Parenting'...

There is a wonderful book called Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne. Not only is it an inspiration to all parents, but I think any adult can learn a thing or two from it about flourishing through simplicity in these increasingly busy times.

The things we want the most have more risk associated with them...

It’s one of life’s cruel ironies, but the things we want the most have more risks associated with them, because we care more about the outcome - and so even thinking about them makes us feel vulnerable.

The Power of Vulnerability

One of the most viewed TED talsk, by Brené Brown, is titled ‘The Power of Vulnerability’. As a researcher, Brown wanted to find out what truly ‘connected’ people had in common, and she discovered they had a shared willingness to be open to vulnerability. This openness allowed them to make deep personal connections, because the places where we experience fear and vulnerability are the same places where we will find our dreams, along with increadible experiences of love and joy.

We can easily forgive a child...

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Less fixed, more flexible

Dr Ilona Boniwell, one of the world leaders in the field of positive psychology, described how people tend to have either a ‘fixed mindset’ or a ‘growth’ mindset. Her research discovered this often has to do with how we were taught at school or parented.

I had spent years climbing the ladder of success...

I had spent years climbing the ladder of success, but it was leaning up the wrong wall.

If we try for something that we truly care about...

If we try for something that we truly care about and then fail to make it happen, won’t we feel more hurt or a bigger failure? That’s what many of us are programmed to believe, but it’s another myth. I’ve never once regretted trying my best, even things didn’t turned out the way I had planned.

If, instead, you would have focused on the key things...

If, instead, you would have focused on the key things that would make you the perfect candidate for this promotion and chosen the one or two areas where you knew you excelled and could add real value to the company, you wouldn’t have been distracted by the fearful talk in your head. You wouldn’t have worried yourself out of trying because you would have focused on thekey things that made you right for the job.

And if you do what you do authentically...

And if you do what you do authentically, then you will automatically navigate your way towards those in your natural tribe […]

Put your own oxygen mask on first

The next step is to understand what is important to you and your hapiness. This isn’t always as easy as we mght think, because most of us have been conditioned from an early age to ‘know’ what we should and shouldn’t want. If you’re a parent, you’ll appreciate the almost instantaneous guilt you feel the moment you take a second to breathe, let alone take a whole day to yourself. This isn’t about what your parent, partner, friends or children want for you or what they think you should want for yourself. This is about whay you want and what you need to change or stop doing in order to get it. To be the best parent, parter or friend when the plane is going down you need to put your own oxygen mask on first.

Some Prescriptions for How to Escape into a Deeper Basin

Some of the suggestions for speeding upt the process of conceiving a creative idea fit in well with the pircture of using a controlled level of noise to avoid getting stuck in too shallow a basin of attraction. One can try to escape from the original basin by means of a random perturbation – for example Edward DeBono recommends trying to apply to a problem, whatever it is, the last noun on the front page of today’s bewspaper.

For a case more like that of biological evolution...

For a case more like that of biological evolution, we can turn to the competition among human societies in the past. To a great extent, fitness was measured by population. In Southeast Asia, for instance, some ethnic groups practiced irrigated rice agriculture while others raised dry rice, often by slashing and burning the forest. The irrigated-rice peoples, such as the Central Thai, the Lao, or the Vietnamese, were able to put many more individuals on the ground per unit area than their neighbours. Denser population helped them to dominate the dry-rice peoples, and in many cases to drive them back into remote hilly terrain. Looking toward the future, we may well ask whether it is desirable for density or total numbers to continue to determine winners and losers in the same way.

Deception Among Birds

For amusing examples of the exploitation of opportunities by species interacting with other species, we can turn to lying as practiced by animals other than humans. Deception by mimicry is well known; the viceroy butterfly, for instance, resembles the monarch and thus profits by the bad taste of the latter. The cuckoo (in the Old World) and the cowbird (in the New World) practice another kind of deception by lazing their eggs in the nests of other birds; the intrusive chicks then do away with the eggs or chicks that belong in the nest and monopolize the attention of the foster parents. But actual lying?

Advantages of sexual reproduction

In any case, the advantages of sexual reproduction must be considerable to outweigh the obvious disadvantage of breaking up the successful genotypes of parents and grandparents that survived long enough to reproduce. These advantages accrue to the population as a whole, however, while many evolutionary biologists insist that selection pressures are exerted only on individuals. Perhaps that need not be a rigid rule.

Inclusive fitness and the selfish gene

A further complication in utilizing the concept of fitness arizes in higher organsisms that make use of sexual reproduction. Each such organism conveys only half its genes to a given offspring, while the remaining half derive from the other parent. The offspring are not clones, but merely close relatives. And the organism has other close relatives, the survival of which can also contribute to the propagation of genes similar to its own. Thus biologists have developed the notion of “inclusive fitness”, which takes account of the extent to which relatives of a given organism survive to reproduce, weighted according to the closeness of the relationship. (Of course inclusive fitness also takes account of the sirvival of the organism itself.) Evolution should have a general tendency to favor genotypes exhibiting high inclusive fitness, especially through inherited patterns of behavior that promote the survival of an organism and its close relatives. Tha tendency is called “kin selection”, and it fits nicely with a picture of evolution in which organisms are merely devices “used” by genes to propagate themselves. That point of view has been popularized under the name of the “selfish gene.”

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system. Some of those regularities can be traced back to the fundamental physical laws governing the universe. Others arise from the fact that many characteristics of a given part of the universe at a given time are related to one another through their common origin in some past incident. Those characteristics have features in common; they exhibit mutual information. For example, automobiles of a given model resemble one another because they all originate from the same design, which contains many arbitrary features that could have been chosen differently. Such “frozen accidents” can make themselves felt in all sort of ways. Looking at coins of King Henry VIII of England, we may reflect upon all the references to him not only on coins but in charters, in documents relating to the seizure of abbeys, and in history books and how those would all be different if his elder brother Arthur had survived to mount the throne instead of him. All those references depend on the same frozen accident.

If the interference between each pair of coarse-grained histories is zero...

If the interference between each pair of coarse grained histories is zero, either exactly or to an exceedingly good approximation, then all the coarse grained histories are said to decohere. The quantity $D$ of each coarse-grained history and itself is then a true probability, with the additive property. In practice, quantum mechanics is always applied to sets of decohering coarse-grained histories, and that is why it is able to predict probabilities. ($D$, by the way, is called the decoherence functional; the wod “functional” indicates that it depends on histories.)

The algorithmic information content of each alternative history of the universe...

The algorithmic information content of each alternative history of the universe evedently receives a tiny contribution from the simple fundamental laws, along with a gigantic contribution from all the quantum accidents that arise along the way. But it is not only the AIC of the universe that is dominated by those accidents. Although they are chance events, their effects contribute heavily to effective complexity as well.

Limerick on the speed of light

There was a young lady named Bright
Who could travel much faster than light.
She set out one day, in a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.

Theory tends to emerge as a profession as a science matures...

Theory tends to emerge as a profession as a science matures and as the depth and power of theoretical methods increase. But the roles of theory and observation should be regarded as distinct whether or not there are separate classes of practitioners for the two activities.

Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel...

Similarly, in the will of the Swedish dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel, who established the Nobel prizes, the science prizes are listed with physics first, chemistry second, and physiology and medicine third. As a result, the physics prize is always awarded at the beginning of the ceremony in Stockholm. If there is just one physics prize winner and that winner is a married man, it is his wife who comes into dinner on the arm of the King of Sweden. (When my friend Abdus Salam, a citizen of Pakistan and a Muslim, received a share of the physics prize in 1979, he turned up in Sweden with his two wives, np doubt causing some problems of protocol to arise.) The winner or winners in chemistry rank second in protocol, and those in physiology and medicine third. Mathematics is omitted from Nobel’s will for reasons that are not really understood. There is a persistent rumor that Nobel was angy with a Swedish mathematician, Mittag-Leffler, for stealing the affections of a woman, but, as far as I know, it is only a rumor.

But is the information obrained from the outside world...

But is the information obtained from the outside world, for example from a parent who speaks the language in question, sufficient to construct such an internal grammar? That question has been answered in the negative by Noam Chomsky and his followers, who conlcude that the child must come already equipped at birth with a great deal of information applicable to the grammar of any natural human language. The only plausible source of such information is a biologically evolved innate proclivity to speak languages with certain grammatical features, shared by all natural human languages. The grammar of each individual languange also contains additional features, not biologically programmed. Many of those vary from language to language, although some are probably iniversal like the innate ones. The additional features are what the child has to learn.

It is not at all atrivial matter that there are such things as species...

It is not at all a trivial matter that there are such things as species; and they are not just artifacts of the biologist’s mind, as has sometimes been claimed. Ernst Mayr, the great ornithologist and biogeographer, likes to recount how, as a young researcher in New Guinea, he counted a hundred and twenty-seven species of birds nesting in the valley where he was working. The members of the local tribe counted a hundred and twenty-six; the only difference between their list and his was that they lumped together two very similar species of gerygone that Ernst, with his scientific training, was able to distinguish from each other. Even more important than the agreement among different sorts of people is the fact that the birds themselves can tell whether or not they belong to the same species. Animals of different species are not usually in the habit of mating with one another, and in the rare cases where they do, the hybrids they produce are likely to be sterile. In fact, one of the most successful definitions of what constitutes a species is the statement that there is not effective exchange of genes by ordinary means between members of different species.

Nietzsche introduced the distiction between...

Nietzsche introduced the distinction between “Apollonians,” wo favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of evidence, and “Dionysians,” who lean more toward intuition, synthesis and passion. These traits are sometimes described as correlating very roughly with emphasis on the use of the left and right brain respectively. But some of us seem to belong to another category: “Odysseans,” who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself...

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no glueing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. Chapter 22 describes some efforts just getting under way to carry out such a crude study of world problems, including all the relevant aspects, not only environmental, demographic, and economic, but also social, political, military, diplomatic, and ideological. The object of the study is not just to speculate about the future, but to try to identify among the multiple possible future paths for the human race and the rest of the biosphere any reasonably probable ones that could lead to greater sustainability. Here the word sustainability is used in a broad sense, including not only the avoidance of environmental catastrophe, but of catastrophic war, widespread long-lasting tyranny, and other major evils as well.

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe...

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with all their motions and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good or evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. So I believe it’s not the right picture.

I think I entered MIT in Math...

I think I entered MIT in Math (course XVIII). After a bit I went to Franklin (then head of Math Department) to ask “what is the use of higher mathematics beside teaching more higher mathematics.” He answered, “if you have to ask that then you don’t belong in mathematics.”

It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously...

It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously. They study ancient Greek archeology in elementary school for six years, having to take 10 hours of that subject every week. It is a kind of ancestor worship for they emphasize always how wonderful the ancient Greeks were - and wonderful indeed they were. When to encourage them by saying yes and look how modern man has advanced beyond the acient Greeks (thinking of experimental science, the development of mathematics, the art of the renaissance, the great depth and understanding of the relative shallowness of Greep philosophy, etc., etc.) - they say, “What do you mean - what was wrong with the ancient Greeks?” They continually put their age down and the old age up, until to point out the wonders of the present seems to be an unjustified lack of appreciation for the past. They were upset when I said that the thing of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation - which, altho it is very little used, must have been psychologiclly wonderful because it showed a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do, and therefore helped in the renaissance which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients - what they are learning in school is to be intimidated into thinking thet have fallen fo far below their super ancestors.

Simple questions with complicated answers are always asked by dull students...

Simple questions with complicated answers are always asked by dull students. Only intelligent students have been trainedto ask complicated questions with simple answers - as any teacher knows (and only teachers think there are any simple questions with simple answers).

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear...

“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”

I can live with doubt and uncertainty...

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty,” he said. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” He once defined science as belief in the ignorance of experts.

All these formidable talents...

All these formidable talents have been subsumed by American media realities; who can match television news and talking heads, and even the daily New York Times, in self-parody? Reality in America is more grotesque and hilarious than any parodist could hope to trump.

As I lay dying...

As I lay dying portrays the human condition as being catastrophic, with the nuclear family the most terrible of the catastrophes.

His spirit is ready...

His spirit is ready (willing) and his flesh is not weak. He dies extraordinarily, to the music of his own: “Let it be.” No death in secular literature haunts the reader more. Why? Hamlet’s final words - “the rest is silence” - are spiritually ambiguous, yet I read them as anticipating annihilation rather than resurrection. Therein may be the best answer to the question “Why read Hamlet?” He does not die a vicarious atonement for us, but rather with the single anxiety of bearing a wounded name. Whether we ourselves expect annihilation or resurrection, we are likely to end caring about our name. Hamlet, the most charismatic and intelligent of all fictive characters, prefigures our hopes for courgae at our common end.

Proust defined friendship...

Proust defined friendship as being “halfway between physical exhaustion and mental boredom,” and said of love that it was “ striking example of how little reality means to us.”

Of death, Proust remarks...

Of death, Proust remarks that it cures us of the desire for immortality […].

Nietzsche, in one of his...

Nietzsche, in one of his most Hamlet-like formulations, advised us that what we could find words for, was something already dead in our hearts, so that there was always some kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

It's perhaps a historical pecularity...

It’s perhaps a historical pecularity, but we also lack a living woman poet who can rival Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. Ideological cheerleading does not necessarily nurture grat, or even good, readers and writers; instead it seems to malform them.

Lust is the hero-villain...

Lust is the hero-villain of this night-piece of the spirit, male lust for the “hell” that concludes the sonnet, hell being the Elizabethean-Jacobean slang for the vagina. The ancient commonplace of sadness-after-coition achieves its apothesis in Sonnet 129, but at more than the expense of spirit. So impacted is this sonnet’s language that it evades its apparent adherence to the Renaissance believe that each sexual act shortens a man’s life.

I love "Sir Patrick Spence"...

I love “Sir Patrick Spence” because it has a tragic economy almost unique in its stoic heroism. There is a sense throughout the poem that heroism is necessarily self-destructive, and yet remains admirable.

The pleasures of reading...

The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.

The accent of belatedness...

The accent of belatedness is cought and held perfectly, in what we finally see is the saddest kind of love lyric, one that memorializes only a drem of youth.

Self-improvement is a large enough project...

Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit: there are no ethics of reading. The mind should be kept at home until its primal ignorance has been purged; premature excursions into activism have their charm, but are time-consuming, and for reading there will never be enough time.

Nostalgia for lost illusions...

Nostalgia for lost illusions, loves that never quite were, happiness perhaps only tasted - these are the emotions Calvino evokes. In Isidora, one of the Cities of Memory, “the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,” but alas you can arrive at Isidora only in old age.

More than a comedian of genius...

More than a comedian of genius, [Flannery O’Connor] had also the penetrating insight that religion for her countrymen and -women was not the opiate, but rather the poetry of the people.

Maupassant has learned...

Maupassant has learned from his teacher, Flaubert, that “talent is a prolonged patience” at seeing what others tend not to see.

We are indeed already in the "inferno of the living"...

We are indeed already in the “inferno of the living”. We can accept it, and so cease to be conscious of it. But there is a better way, and it might be called the wisdom of Italo Calvo:

In major short stories...

In major short stories, reality becomes fantastic and phantasmagoria becomes disconcertingly mundane. That may be why so many readers, these days, shy away from volumes of stories, and purchase novels instead, even when the stories are of much higher quality.

Frank O'Connor, who disliked Hemmingway...

Frank O’Connor, who disliked Hemmingway as much as he liked Chekhov, remarks in The Lonely Voice that Hemmingway’s stories “illustrate a technique in search of a subject,” and therefore become a “minor art.”

Gestaltungsmächtig geben wir uns der Ohnmacht hin...

Gestaltungsmächtig geben wir uns der Ohnmacht hin, Panik ist unser Normalzustand. In anderen Regionen der Welt, die von Armut, Bürgerkriegen und Naturkatastrophen geschüttelt werden, reden die Menschen von Aufbruch und Zusammenrücken. In Europa, im Westen, reden wir von Spaltung und Ende.

Würde sich Wachstum der Steigerung des natürlichen und sozialen Kapitals verpflichten...

Würde sich Wachstum der Steigerung des natürlichen und sozialen Kapitals verpflichten, wäre dies das genaue Gegenteil bloßen Gewinn- und Konsumwachstums und ihrer hässlichen Nebenwirkungen.

Eine erschwingliche Vollversorgung...

Eine erschwingliche Vollversorgung durch erneuerbare Energien ohne Wachstum ist wie die wundersame Brotvermehrung ohne Brot.

Zwar können wir Technologien für morgen entwickeln...

Zwar können wir Technologien für morgen entwickeln. Aber wir können nicht wie die Menschen von morgen darüber denken und empfinden. Grundlage unserer Annahmen, was Zukunftsbeweohner wollen, bleibt unser Wertekanon der Gegenwart. Als Folge messen wir heutigen Denk- und Bedürfnismodellen zu große Bedeutung bei und gehen beispielsweise davon aus, sinkende Preise für grünen Strom führten dazu, dass mehr Menschen Autos kaufen (aus moralischer Selbstlegitimation), damit längere Reisen unternehmen und mehr Energie verbrauchen als zuvor. Diese Annahme ist möglicherweise falsch.

In der Autobranche hat man stets versucht herauszufinden...

In der Autobranche hat man stets versucht herauszufinden, welche Autos die Leute morgen kaufen werden. Dass sie gar keine Autos mehr kaufen wollen - auf die Idee kam niemand.

2020 (auf den Tag genau, als die Aufkündigung des Klimaabkommens durch die USA in Kraft trat)...

2020 (auf den Tag genau, als die Aufkündigung des Klimaabkommens durch die USA in Kraft trat) verfügte Wladimir Putin klangvoll, bis 2030 werde Russland seine CO$_2$-Emissionen auf 70 Prozent der Menge von 1990 senken. Bitte lesen Sie aufmerksam: nicht um, auf 70 Prozent! Die Pointe: Schon 2018 lag Russland be 52 Prozent. Demzufolge sähe die neue Kreml-Strategie eine Steigerung der Emissionen vor.

Verwaltungsrechtler forderten...

Verwaltungsrechtler forderten, den staatlichen Erziehungsauftrag und das Demonstrationsrecht in einen Zukunftsbezug zu setzen, und betonen die Bedeutsamkeit des Arguments: “Wir können nicht für die Zukunft lernen, wenn wir keine haben.”

Eine der beliebtesten Verschwörungstheorien...

Eine der beliebtesten Verschwörungstheorien kennen Sie wahrscheinlich, der zufolge wir niemals auf dem Mond waren. Dazu sagte Ernst Stuhlinger, Direktor des NASA-Raumforschungszentrums in Alabama und Weggefährte Wernher von Brauns: »Der Weg zum Glauben ist kurz und bequem, der Weg zum Wissen lang und steinig.«

Alle Versuchsanordnungen der Spieltheorie...

Alle Versuchsanordnungen der Spieltheorie laufen auf das Gleiche hinaus: Treten Spieler aus der Anonymität ins Licht, steigt ihre Bereitschaft, altruistisch zu handeln, um das Dreifache, denn sie werden mit etwas weit Kostbarerem und Erstrebenswerterm belohnt als Geld - mit sozialem Ansehen. Spielen nichtanonyme Spieler um das Allgemeingut, wird dieses fast durchweg gerettet, und jeder gelangt zu Wohlstand.

Vor einigen Jahren führte der Physiker...

Vor einigen Jahren führte der Physiker und Wissenschaftsmoderator Ranga Yogeshwar ein experiment zum menschlichen Schwarmverhalten durch. […] Zweihundert Menschen waren in einer Halle versammelt , in deren Mitte ein Kreis gemalt war, groß genug, alle zu fassen, sodass jeder genug Raum um sich hatte. Entlang des Kreises waren im Uhrzeigersinn Tafeln mit den Ziffern 1 bis 12 aufgestellt. Wir baten die Probanden nun, ziel-und absichtslos im Kreisinneren umherzuwandern, dabei das ganze Terrain auszuschöpfen und dabei immer eine Armlänge Abstand […] zu den Nebenleuten zu wahren. Das ergab ein hübsch homogenes Bild. Wie Moleküle in lauwarmem Kaffee verteilten sich die Menschen im Kreis und trudelten durcheinander. Zuvor jedoch hatten wir einigen Teilnehmern eine spezielle, geheime Anweisung gegeben. Etwa ein Zehntel erhielt sie, keiner wusste, dass sie außer ihm noch jemand bekommen hatte. Die Anweisung lautete, nach etwa zwei Minuten des Umherwanderns langsam zur Ziffer 12 zu gehen und davor zu verbleiben. Genauso geschah es. Bald bildete sich vor der 12 eine kleine Menschenmenge. Keine weiter Minute, und andere folgten nach. Fünf Minuten später und alle 200 Probanden knubbelten sich vor der 12, ohne dass jemand sie dorthin gerufen hätte. Wir erkannten: Wenn ein ausreichend hoher Prozentsatz der Gesellschaft sein Verhalten ändert, hat alleine das schon Auswirkungen auf das Gesamtverhalten, obwohl keine Aufforderung zum Mittmachen oder gar Missionierung ergangen ist. Anstatt den Versuch aufzuklären, wiederholten wir ihn mit einer anderen Zahl. Nur fünf Prozent erhielten die Anweisung. Diesmal gab es keinen Masseneffekt. Fünf Prozent reichten offenbar nicht aus, um eine kollektive Verhaltensänderung in Gang zu setzen.

Die Nachhaltigen Branchen...

Die nachhaltigen Branchen sind erst als Reaktion auf die Klimakrise und schwindende Ressourcen entstanden. Warum sollte jemand technologien erfinden, die kein Mensch braucht, um dann das dazugehörige Problem zu konstruieren?

Klimaschutz kann nur funktionieren...

Klimaschutz kann nur funktionieren, wenn Deutschland wirtschaftlich leistungsfähig bleibt«, stellt Bundeswirtschaftsminister Peter Altmaier fest. Andersrum wird eher ein Schuh draus: Deutschland kann nur leistungsfähig bleiben, wenn es konsequenten Klimaschutz betreibt. Ökologische Vorreiter gehen in der Welt von morgen auch wirtschaftlich in Führung. Wer zögert, wird abgehängt, gefährdet Arbeitsplätze und die Existenz ganzer Branchen.

Offenbar können Erwachsenen nicht anders denken...

Offenbar können Erwachsene nicht anders denken, als dass immer eine Lobby, ein Konzern, eine Partei dahinter stecken muss, eine Verabredung zum Bescheißen. Das ist ihre Schwäche.

Gemeinhin wird Altruismus definiert als...

Gemeinhin wird Altruismus definiert als selbstloses, uneigennütziges Handeln zum Wohnen anderer, meist Schlechtgestellter. Mit Blick auf zuvor Gesagtes ahnen wir, dass der Altruismus so selbstlos gar nicht ist, eher eine besonders rücksichtsvolle Ausprägung des Egoismus - und genau das brauchen wir. Handeln zum Wohle der Allgemeinheit, den eigenen Vorteil vor Augen.

Manche Maler, hat Picasso gesagt...

Manche Maler, hat Picasso gesagt,verwandeln die Sonne in einen gelben Fleck, andere einen gelben Fleck dank ihrer Kunst in eine Sonne.

Not bad, not. It's funny...

Not bad, not. It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to do.

Glück sind die Momente...

Bud:

Liebe das Leben, bekämpfe es nicht.

Bud-an-Terence...

Bud an Terence:

This is the result of two decades of unckecked innovation...

This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation - the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism...

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanism by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science, if fact, is anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Haydn isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of sublte coercion.

She cheerfully shared her opinion that...

She cheerfully shared her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth.

Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind...

Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.

A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve...

A change in law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse this disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.

I think everybody has had this kind of experience...

I think averybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.

That was how you knew you could trust each other...

That is how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crime.

I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS...

I took along a chep laptop running TAILS, which is a LINUX-based “amnesiac” operating system - meaning it forgets everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof”, or disguise, the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way associable with mine. Useful enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.

It as in fact slightly better...

It was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.

These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion...

These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion if a media campaign, were shocking demonstraions of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim cedit.

Kids used to be able to go online...

Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is the only environment in which you can grow up - by which I mean that the early Internet’s disassociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiflty punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

I'd briefly jam a network...

I’d briefly jam a network, causing its legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their “authentication packets”, which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on just like any other “authorized” user.

Ira "Gus" Hunt, chief technology officer...

Ira “Gus” Hunt, chief technology officer of the CIA in front of US journalists (2013):

The agency's internal policies...

The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure”. Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party” - your telephone service provider - you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you once mau have had.

There is simply no way to ignore privacy...

There is simply no way to ignore privacy. Because citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up for convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have […]. You assume that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about […]. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peacefully assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning for you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor […].

The IC had come to understand...

The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that knowledge to their advantage. They’d hacked the Constitution.

This led to the practice...

This led to the practice called LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysys used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection - reading their emails, listening on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, none in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself.

Diverse motives and approaches...

Diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving a common goal.

Would you rather let your coworkers...

Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?

I was suprised to be reminded...

I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendmendts were all deliberately, carefully designed to create inefficiencies and hamper the government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.

The better you can understand...

The better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.

In an authoritarian state...

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state. […] It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time - not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.

America's fundamental laws...

Americas’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.

I wondered whether this would be...

I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement.

Wenn nichts gewisser ist als der Tod...

Wenn nichts gewisser ist als der Tod, so ist nichts ungewisser als sein Zeitpunkt.

Aber in Wahrheit hat das Mannesalter...

Aber in Wahrheit hat das Mannesalter mit dem Horizont gemein, daß es in dem Maße zurückweicht, wie man sich ihm nähert.

Ich weiß wohl, wie sehr es einen Mann...

Ich weiß wohl, wie sehr es einen Mann, wenn er Leben genommen hat, danach verlangt, welches zu geben.

Frauen sind den Kastanien gegensätzlich...

Frauen sind den Kastanien gegensätzlich. Sie sind außen weich und innen stachelig.

So wenig ich sicher war...

Sowenig ich sicher war, sie eines Tages gewinnen zu können, so wenig wollte ich Gefahr laufen, sie gleich hier zu verlieren.

Des Menschen Rechtssprechung...

Des Menschen Rechtssprechung ist so unvollkommen wie seine Natur.

Der Kuss ist wie ein kleines Tierchen...

Der Kuss ist wie ein kleines Tierchen, das überall herumkrabbelt.

Wahrlich ein Jammer...

Wahrlich ein Jammer, wenn das Gold des Menschen Geschicke bestimmt anstatt ihm z dienen.

Er war unklug genug...

Er war unklug genug, die Irrungen der Menschen aus der Welt schaffen zu wollen.

Der Prozess erst...

Der Prozess erst macht die Hexe, nicht umgekehrt.

Wenn das Gericht eine Hexe verhaftet...

Wenn das Gericht eine Hexe verhaftet, sperrt es eine von ihm bezahlte Hexe mit in die Zelle, um sie zum Plaudern zu bringen.

Es muss nur einer aus seinem Loch kriechen...

Es muss nur einer aus seinem Loch kriechen und zu reisen beginnen, gleich lacht ihm die Welt in unvergleichlicher Vielfalt!

Unseren Balken vergessend...

Unseren Balken vergessend, betrachten wir genüßlich den Splitter im Auge des Bruders.